The retailing of prescription pharmaceuticals is often highly regulated. For example, in the United States, retailers are regulated by a variety of different government agencies, with the regulations typically varying by state. One common regulation requires that the pharmacy retailer identify the pharmacy customer and ensure that the pharmacy customer is authorized to pick up the prescriptions requested. Today this is a manual process that requires the retailer converse with the customer and request various identifying information from the customer. For example, the retailer may request the customer to provide names and birth dates for the persons to whom the prescriptions are intended. As will be appreciated, this process can be time consuming. Furthermore, due to the manual method of verifying identify of a customer and authorization to pick up prescriptions, customers typically do not use mobile payment solutions to complete the transaction. This adds additional manual steps to the overall transaction, which slows the total time necessary to complete the transaction.
Additionally, it is common for pharmacy retailers to utilize a rewards program whereby customer's purchases can be monitored and the customer may receive various benefits, or rewards, for patronizing a particular retailer. For example, some pharmacy retailers utilize a rewards program whereby customers may receive some benefit (e.g., in-store gift card, coupons, or the like) once the customer has a specified number of prescriptions filled at that retailer. Adding the purchase to a rewards account is also a manual process. For example, customers may carry a rewards card that can be scanned at the point of sale to identify the customer. As another example, customers can manually enter a phone number connected to their rewards account. As another example, customers may use a key chain tag to identify their rewards account. In a specific example, when a customer uses a drive through to pick up a prescription, the customer would need to turn off their car to allow the key chain tag to be scanned and thus connect the purchase to their rewards account. As such, adding a rewards accounts to a retail pharmacy purchase adds additional manual steps to the overall transaction, which slows the total time necessary to complete the transaction
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present improvements are desired.